Steve Tem - Ubo

“Who is that? Whose child is this?” he said, but he heard no words coming out of his mouth. He had plenty of words—they filled his head, but none could quite make it to his tongue.

Now he could not even lift his head; it had fallen like a boulder against his chest. He felt as if he’d been separated from it. Somehow his mind had travelled to a safer place.

He was staring at his feet. The second and third toes of the left foot were joined, so it was, indeed, his foot he was staring at.

I have more important things to do than look at my feet today!

The legs above those feet were shorter than normal. He would be embarrassed by them, if Stalin could be embarrassed. Because of them he’d had the carpenter cut down the legs on his work chair—had anyone noticed?

He now realized that his right leg, his right arm were tingling strangely, the arm beginning to tighten, to curl into itself, becoming as short as his left. It was the most ridiculous thing. He was turning into an insect! He attempted to open his mouth to protest, but the lip on that side lagged behind, the mouth spitting out “Dzhu… dzhu… dzhu.”

He could feel that the child had come closer. He caught a glimpse of the short legs, the torso, the blurred head staring up at him curiously. But he could tell it was a large head, an oversized melon as a child would have. Svetlana? A ridiculous thought; she was a grown woman now. Some child had wandered into the dacha.

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid,” he told the child. He did not know if this was a girl or boy. “You come to see your Uncle Stalin? Of course you have. I’m still your loving uncle, your loving father, despite what my betrayers say.”

Although he was saying the words, he could tell these were not the sounds coming out of his mouth. Coming out of his mouth was garbage, and now he could taste a little bit of blood there, and it made him a little bit frightened, and that made him very angry. He was bleeding somewhere inside himself.

“Go through the doors, child! Tell them your Uncle Stalin needs help!” But he heard something else in his ears. He heard “Dzh… dzhu… dzh.”

His tongue was no good, and this child was too stupid to help him. Or perhaps she was in on it. Perhaps she was here as witness, and once he was dead she would report back to the others.

Traumatized children made the best spies. They listened, they stared, and unless they were the rare, talkative type, you never knew how they felt about anything. You seldom knew if they even comprehended what was going on around them, but of course they did. They absorbed everything. It was how they survived.

He would never have said he was traumatized. He was Stalin. But his father, that old drunk, he never knew how much it had benefited him when he beat him for no reason, when he had berated him, embarrassed him. The old cobbler had helped make him. Unfortunately it had not worked with his own sons. For them, Stalin’s indifference had only made them weaker. They had not known how to use the gift their father had given them.

When they told him his son Yokov had been killed in the war he’d told them “I have no son Yokov.” They thought he had no heart, no compassion. They did not understand what was required of a leader. A leader has no family. Back when he called himself Vassily he had had a son, but not Stalin.

A great leader had to kill his past, he had to eradicate it. His old friends, his fellow bank robbers. Whoever had known anything of Koba in the old days—they could only decrease his legend. They would lose their fingernails, and then they would lose their lives. That drunken cobbler his father, and that old whore his mother—some had the nerve to question his absence from her funeral. Let them say that to Stalin’s face. No one understood what was required to be such a leader. You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves, nor can you maintain one. No one understood. No one but he had the grit required to do what needed to be done. The world took Russia seriously now. No one else but Stalin could have done such a thing. He pitied the country in the hands of whoever dared replace him.

But perhaps Russia should not survive him. Russia would be like a dog who’d lost its master—better a bullet in its head to put it out of its misery.

Svetlana’s mother, Nadezhda. He’d loved her, perhaps more than anyone. His entire life. But she was a foolish woman, who listened to his enemies and betrayed him. She did not understand what was necessary, what he had to be. And so she’d betrayed him, left him, shot herself. And Svetlana, she would be just like her mother.

All the great rulers had been harsh—they inspired love through fear. So why had his wife, his daughter, all of them, not loved him more?

His head was much worse. It was too wounded to contain his thoughts. His thoughts were spinning around in the air outside his head like little drunken sparrows, like little Svetlanas, chattering away about nothing.

Why had the child not gone for help? She was in on it—she wanted to watch him die. He could have them all killed. He could make up their crimes.

It was important to stay calm and focused. Outside the sky would be wet and overcast with no sun. He would survive this. He would move across the world like a crocodile eating his own.

“Look at my face, child! Look at my face! You must do as your leader tells you!” He heard these words in his head as he spoke them aloud. But he was aware that those were not the sounds coming out of his mouth. That blasted “Dzhu… Dzhu.” A crocodile who snores. The child would never understand him.

If she would just look into his face she would see that he meant business. He had a face made out of stone, and a glance of such fierceness he could make the bravest men cower. He used to practice that impressive look in front of a mirror. Its strength, its seeming impassivity, as if nothing could ever affect him, then at the right moment he’d spring the trap and his face would become a terror. His smallpox scars only heightened the effect. His yellow eyes like a tiger’s flashing his anger, one eyebrow raised almost vertically, a deeply etched network of wrinkles around his eyes.

His mother had had such a face. She’d already buried three infants by the time he was born.

He’d proved himself through his ruthlessness. He’d made himself a legend, a dozen legends. He’d contained a multitude. Iosif, Chizhikov, Nizheradze, Ryobi, David, Ivanovich, Vassily, Soso, Koba, Stalin—he’d used all these names and more.

Whoever he was, he wasn’t even Stalin. Stalin was the unparalleled power of the Soviet Union—the figure in the portraits and on the newsreels. The Great Uncle and the Great Terror.

Ivan the Terrible had been his true teacher. Stalin understood that man as no one else did. When Eisenstein had filmed his masterpiece Ivan the Terrible Stalin had advised him well. He’d been the one to point out how in part two Ivan had kissed his wife much too long. Worst, he had made Ivan too indecisive, and his beard too long.

Ivan had been very cruel, but of course he had needed to be cruel. Ivan’s only mistake had been that he had killed too few of the boyars.

Stalin did not know how long he had been standing there. He wondered if he might have actually fallen asleep between one step and the next. He could not find the child in the room anymore. Good, perhaps she had gone for help.

He discovered that he was able to steal a few steps now. Right out from under Death’s nose. The thought made him smile. Awkwardly he made his way over to the table. He picked up his copy of Pravda . Good, good. It was beginning to feel like a normal day. He felt so thirsty, like one of those desperate soldiers trudging through the desert in Ford’s The Lost Patrol . He reached for the bottle of Narzan mineral water, then stopped himself, suspicious. Some hours beforehe’d had some, sometime, he wasn’t sure when. He wasn’t quite sure where it had come from. Where was everyone? What time? He was slowing down. Everything was beginning to feel very peculiar again. He had to order his hand to reach into his vest pocket and bring out his pocket watch, almost dropping it, his hand betraying him. He tried to understand what the numbers were telling him about the time. He had forgotten how to tell time.